Nota: "Rio+20 must make inclusive innovation stepping stone to a sustainable future"

Rio+20 must make inclusive innovation stepping stone to a sustainable future

To map out a better tomorrow, the summit's negotiators need to look hard at the nature, depth and scope of inclusive innovation

Forty years ago, the world's leaders met to discuss our perilous
dependency on a stressed global environment. In Stockholm then, as in
Rio now, innovation was key. But at Rio+20, negotiators need to look a
lot harder at the nature, depth and scope of inclusion in innovation if
they are to map out a more equitable, socially just and sustainable
future.

Progress on innovation for development has not gone
far enough: in the 1980s, serious efforts by industry and governments
began to be devoted to developing cleaner technologies, products and
services. And the Local Agenda 21 action plan developed at Rio in 1992
recognised the need for smaller-scale innovation, with communities
making efforts to shape their own sustainable development. (Continúa >>)

Despite
these efforts, however, relative improvements in environmental
performance fail to keep pace with absolute increases in consumption; as
a result, economic activity shows little sign of decoupling from
environmental degradation.

At the same time, persistent
forms of social exclusion and increasing inequality – beyond the
growing, high-consuming middle-classes – indicate that the social
justice dimensions of sustainable development are proving just as
elusive as environmental goals. Partly as a result, the European
Commission's 2020 growth strategy and the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development's innovation strategy recognise that the
fruits of innovation need to be much more inclusive as well as
environmentally sustainable.
But what is meant by inclusive
innovation? Reading through the swathe of policy documents published in
the runup to Rio+20, innovation is mainly considered inclusive in terms
of its outputs: the distribution of goods and services. This describes a
kind of lower-down-the-pyramid consumption of innovation – cheaper
forms of stuff marketed to the poor. But what about innovation that is
inclusive in its process, as well as the outputs? What about opening up
innovation processes to involve people in prioritising sustainability
problems, making design choices, decisions on evaluative criteria, and
undertaking production processes and other aspects of innovation?

While
marketing redeveloped technologies to the poor might appear inclusive
to the innovator, it can appear quite desultory to the recipients. Being
asked which seed should be prioritised for drought-resistant genetic
engineering, at uncertain cost, simply is not as inclusive for farmers
as being involved, first and foremost, in the more rounded development
of locally driven innovations in agricultural systems, and with wider
development benefits in the frame. We need to think about the forms of
inclusion in innovation for sustainability.

The depth of
inclusion is also important. Are people merely consulted on a given
innovation developed by others, or are local communities involved in
initiating the whole development, with experts and resources brought in
as necessary? There is a wealth of experience on participatory
techniques for inclusion to draw upon here, from the use of citizens'
juries, to action research to empower community-level planning and
participatory product development – used in the seed sector, for
example, to incorporate farmer preferences into improved varieties.
These
considerations tap into debate around citizens' science and
democratising expertise, and how to involve people in shaping the
science and technology agendas of governments, research institutes,
universities and corporations (where the majority of technological
innovation takes place). Alongside its strides forward in biotechnology
and information and communication technologies for development (ICTs),
India is also beginning to take these kinds of local innovations more
seriously, for example through the activities of the National Innovation Foundation.

An
additional consideration is the scope of inclusion. Does inclusive
innovation have higher aspirations than merely developing goods and
services, extending to goals such as building organisational and even
political capabilities, say? The vision of the social technologies movement in South America
is to use inclusive innovation as a focusing device for purposeful
social transformation. The design and self-build process for rainwater
harvesting devices, for example, are not the sole ends of the innovative
activity. Rather, the innovation is a means towards organising
communities and empowering them to reclaim their rights and control over
other local resources beyond rainwater.

Alongside
considerations of form, depth and scope, we need to recognise that the
spaces for inclusion in innovation remain relatively few. One promising
space is what is beginning to be referred to as grassroots innovation.
In community food and energy initiatives, local (re-)manufacturing and
tool swapping, complementary currencies, community sanitation and water
projects, housing co-operatives, and so on, there appears to be a
ferment of grassroots innovative activity globally.

These
activities are being supported through networks of activists and
organisations generating novel, bottom–up solutions for sustainable
development that respond to both the local situation and the knowledge,
interests and values of the communities involved. Grassroots innovation
is not a panacea: it is admittedly compromised, necessarily pragmatic,
and undeniably partial. But there is much to be learnt from it. Rio+20
should be judged on the extent to which it takes these initiatives
seriously and learns from them.

But the Rio process needs
to empower more than the established grassroots innovators themselves.
It needs to open further spaces for inclusion, such as in the setting of
scientific research agendas, the governance of emerging technologies,
and the priorities for training, skills and capabilities in design and
engineering.

At Stockholm in 1972, activists set up an
exhibition outside the main conference, where they displayed alternative
technologies appropriate for a more inclusive, democratic and
sustainable future. Some of the technologies on display, such as wind
turbines, are now established as multi-billion dollar industries. They
have become part of the vanguard for a green economy; but one that
appears to have lost sight of the social justice dimensions of
sustainable development. The activists in Stockholm understood that
responses to environmental and economic crisis have to include attention
to the democratisation of science and technology – to empower social
control over innovation as well as include. That political requirement
persists – at Rio+20 and beyond.

Adrian Smith and Adrian Ely are research fellows at the ESRC Steps Centre and SPRU, University of Sussex, UK